NEWS & DOCUMENTS

In the presidential elections on Sunday, 26 November, a massive punishment vote gave a heavy defeat to the regime emerged from the June 2009 military coup. President Juan Orlando Hernández of the National Party launched his re-election despite the constitutional ban, by virtue of a court ruling that authorised him to do so. During the campaign, he resorted to the purchase of votes and the worst forms of clientelism, and after his electoral defeat he maneuverer to impose himself through a scandalous fraud.

The decision of right-wing and reactionary Donald Trump to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of the racist state of Israel is a new support of the United States for Zionism. And a new aggression against the Palestinian people who struggle to recover their lands and their right to national self-determination.

We, the undersigned, wish to express our solidarity with the people and workers of Venezuela, immersed in a terrible social crisis, and who suffer a severe repression in recent protests against hunger and in defence of democratic rights.

The Catalan people have been demonstrating massively for their independence. About one million people mobilised this 11 September in the Diada (traditional national holiday of Catalonia) to support the country's independence and establish a republic. The Catalan Parliament approved the call for a referendum on self-determination so that it is the Catalan people who decide whether to be independent. The Catalan government set it up for next 1 October.

September 28th: International Day for the decriminalization and legalization of abortion

Around the world, 1424 million of women live in countries where access to legal abortion is somehow restricted. In the most poor and unequal regions, such as Africa and Latin America, women face even bigger limitations for being able to decide over their own bodies, with examples like Nicaragua or El Salvador, where abortion is punishable under every possible cause. The illegal status of abortion is one more measure of a capitalist and patriarchal system that pretends to keep us controlled and submissive to exacerbate our super-exploitation.

The young craftsman Santiago Maldonado was accompanying the Mapuche community Pu Lof in Cushamen, province of Chubut, Argentina, in dispute with the landholders of the Italian group Benetton, when on 1 August the repressors of the Gendarmerie carried out a brutal attack. Maldonado was arrested and disappeared by the officers of this police-military body.

After the fraudulent election of the National Constituent Assembly (ANC), the organization Marea Socialista (Socialist Tide) published an "Open Letter to the Chavista left and the autonomous left", signed by its National Task Force, calling "to build a left, democratic, pluralistic, and inclusive movement" to function as a "common space for reflection, elaboration and action".

The proof of Maduro's failure could be seen at the empty polling stations. The population turned its back on the National Constituent Assembly (Asamblea Nacional Constituyente - ANC) in the midst of demonstrations and a surge of the repression, proving that the popular rebellion lives on.